David Cameron yesterday announced an historic shake-up of the welfare system, vowing an end to the culture in which claiming benefits is regarded as an acceptable alternative to work.

The Prime Minister said the measures to curb welfare dependency would help get people back to work and start to turn around the something-for-nothing culture encouraged by Labour.

But, as Melissa Kite has found, those looking to milk the system are not just the stereotypical single mothers of five in council houses, expecting the state to pick up the bill for their irresponsible lifestyles; even the middle classes are looking to claim benefits to which they have little entitlement.

A very chic lady turned to me at a dinner party and in tremulous tones confided that she was being investigated for benefit fraud.

‘Infernal cheek,’ I said. ‘How typical that our chaotic benefits system should make such a stupid mistake. Instead of going after the layabouts, some idiot pen-pusher has put two and two together and made nine.’

‘No,’ she said, her cut-glass voice lowering until it was almost inaudible. ‘I have been fiddling benefits.’ I stared in shock at this elegant woman, dressed from head to foot in Armani. With her salon blow-dried hair and impeccable taste, she was to me the antithesis of what a benefit claimant looked like, never mind a fraudulent one.

Are the Armani-wearing Jobseeker and the yacht-partying scrounger better or worse, morally, than the single mother of five kids in a council house who expects the state to pick up the bill for her irresponsible lifestyle?

But it turned out that while living in central London and working part-time as an upmarket consultant, she had also been registering as unemployed and claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.

When I asked her why she’d been doing this, she shook her head, said how ashamed she was, but that she had seen it as ‘a little bit extra’. I bet you don’t get too many like her to the pound. But then I heard another disturbing anecdote.

A friend who lives in a genteel part of central London tells me that a rebellion is quietly rumbling there. She and other residents in their smart apartment block are up in arms, she says, because they have discovered that one of the flashiest tenants is on housing benefit.

This girl lives the high life. She has one of the larger apartments. She holidays two or three times a year, returning to tell tales of lavish parties on friends’ yachts. She has wealthy parents and was privately educated.

When she confided to a neighbour that she was claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance and that her apartment was being funded by housing benefit, her excuse, broadly, was that she did not earn enough to fund her lifestyle.

So she registers as unemployed, promises to look for work, which she never finds, while her rent is paid by the state. While claiming she is not working, she makes jewellery at home which she sells for fairly tidy sums.

She only wants a little extra, you see. Just something to put towards the clothes bills so she can look nice on those holidays.

Claiming benefits also liberates her from having to ask her parents for help, which would be tiresome. Her family and friends all think she is doing well with her jewellery business.

Meanwhile, in the country, I hear of an equestrian lady who is outraged because at the yard where she stables her horse there is a woman who funds her livery fees by claiming incapacity benefit.

This woman bought a yearling, which she keeps at a cost of several hundred pounds a month, but has never had to work to pay the bills. She makes no secret that she is 'on the sick'.

Despite claiming she is too depressed to work, she turns up at the yard every day to train her filly and seems to be perfectly happy, fit and well.

It is doubtful the benefits office knows that the brand new car the incapacity scheme provided her with is being used to transport her to and from a riding establishment.

Nor that, while claiming she has acute anxiety, she leaps about with a half-wild horse rearing on the end of a ‘lunge line’.

Of course, these are just anecdotes. I have no concrete evidence that there is such a thing as middle-class, or indeed upper-middle-class, benefit fraud on a grand scale. I have no figures, graphs or charts.

This is because there aren’t any. I rang the Department for Work and Pensions to ask if they had clocked many posh benefit cheats and they said it was impossible to quantify benefit fraud by social group.

I pointed out we are always hearing about the asylum seekers housed in luxurious £1 million homes. Just this week, the DWP gave us fresh figures on the scandal of uncapped housing benefit. We know there is an unemployed Somalian who was moved along with his wife and seven children to a three-storey £1.2 million home in Kensington, West London, after complaining that the previous property they were housed in wasn’t good enough.

We know that another Somalian family was moved from a house in Coventry to a £2 million property in West Hampstead, North London, after being similarly picky.

All good examples of the undeserving poor, no doubt. But at a time when society is so down on the feckless for bleeding us dry, is there an even more shocking side to the benefits culture in Britain?

Is it possible that the middle classes want something for nothing, too?

Perhaps they are hitting back and cutting themselves a slice of the benefits cake in a sort of twisted victory blow against the system.

There are, after all, lots of prosperous older people who love to travel using their Freedom Passes, and who might be seen as a prime example of the undeserving rich.

I should say that I have form on this sort of thing. When I discovered that

I could claim a discount on my council tax under the single inhabitant rule, I did it with a feeling of unbridled joy, and have been scrupulously registering for it ever since.

Why? Because as taxes rise relentlessly, and the Government refuses to cut us a break, the squeezed middle are coming to see state benefits as the only perks to be had.

And it’s a twisted sort of poetic justice, but it’s possible that even the most respectable could be hitting back at a system that allows the workshy to profit — by going on the fiddle themselves.

It would not be an entirely new trend if the middle classes were to be rumbled for scrounging. The phenomenon of middle-class shoplifting, for example, is long established: Antony Worrall Thompson, caught stealing cheese and wine from Tesco in Henley-on-Thames recently, is the latest example.

Disgraceful: Many middle-class fraudsters sign on and pretend to look for work, while allowing their lavish lifestyles to be funded by the state

Middle-class thieves always tend to claim they are ill, suffering from some sort of shopping addiction requiring treatment. And they might be. But the fact is that they are also trying to get something for nothing. (Also, when was the last time a spotty oik of a working-class thief ever got off lightly by claiming he needed a week in the Priory?)

I asked around my social circle about this and was shocked to discover more evidence of bourgeois burglary. Or should we say pedigree pilfering? One well-heeled girlfriend confided she always steals pharmaceuticals. Superdrug, Boots, Lloyds — they’ve all been plundered by her.

When I said she had plenty of money to buy things from Boots, she replied: ‘Yes, but I shouldn’t have to pay for medicines.’ In other words, because she perceived the system was bleeding her dry, she’d decided to defraud it for a few essentials every now and then.

Maybe a new class is emerging out of the rubble of Britain’s stagnant benefit culture: the larcenists who lunch. They are, it has to be said, a better breed of ne’er-do-well than the conventional claimant.

But are the Armani-wearing Jobseeker, the yacht-partying scrounger and the medicine pilferer better or worse, morally, than the single mother of five kids in a council house who expects the state to pick up the bill for her irresponsible lifestyle?

It is a difficult question. Like the downtrodden single mum, the posh cheats feel that something is owing to them. ‘Why shouldn’t I get something back for all the taxes I’ve paid? I never claimed a penny before,’ said the Armani Jobseeker, as she tried to justify her little benefits spree.

It certainly comes to something when the middle classes feel so put-upon that going on the sick or stealing dental floss seems like a reasonable way of getting their money’s worth.

The government should be ashamed that it has allowed such an embittered class to develop.